Founder: Professor Wolfe Mays

Mornay Joy

Introduction
Paul Ricoeur, who identified himself primarily as a hermeneutic phenomenologist, was animated by both a sense of wonder and irrepressible curiosity as he undertook diverse explorations of the meaning and purpose of human existence. Ricoeur appreciated that this task was one of interpretation. Initially this involved an examination of myths and symbols, though in time he came to regard the interpretation of texts as more important. An early catch phrase was: “The symbol gives rise to thought.” His famous subsequent detours into narrative and history helped him to clarify the conditions that both support and hinder human beings’ quest to attain a sense of self or identity. In all of these undertakings, Ricoeur did not think that a conflict of interpretations was necessarily a problem to be overcome, but that it witnessed to the richness of human thinking in a variety of disciplines that employed different approaches. Yet he was not a relativist, believing that there are certain standards of judgment that are available to evaluate proposed interpretations. At the same time, he refused to be dogmatic in his pronouncements. Dialogue and mediation marked his preferred approach and he was both generous and magnanimous in his interrogations of other scholars’ works, always striving to “think more” and reach further constructive insights, rather than pronounce any definitive resolutions. He remarked of his dialectical approach:

"I have a combative style, not of hostility – on the contrary, a kind of sympathy -- for my adversary, which means that I always choose my opponents for reasons other than they are popular, “new philosophers”, or in the news. In the end, I explain myself through my best adversaries, and it is rather a debate with myself, without considering how my books will be received by the public. (Ricoeur in Reagan, 1996: 133) "

Phenomenological hermeneutics, according to Ricoeur, can also aid in the task of “self-understanding through the understanding of a symbolic ensemble, of a textual space and, finally, of a diversity of textual worlds” (Ricoeur in Hahn, 1995: 446-7). For Ricoeur, hermeneutics functioned as a mode of discovery – heuristics – as well as a bridge for understanding temporal, spatial, and cultural differences. It had an even further task. It could intervene in instances of misunderstanding, where conflicts, impasses, and aporias occur. In many ways, this contested territory is Ricoeur’s preferred location where, as he says: I have most often found myself and have even more readily placed myself”(Ricoeur in Hahn 447). Perhaps it is in such situations where Ricoeur is at his finest – continually providing innovative insights that help to mediate either intractable barriers or rigid oppositions that could lead to conflict.

The question of Ricoeur’s religious background and its influence looms large in any discussion of his work. While acknowledging his Protestant Huguenot background, Ricoeur steadfastly distinguished between his philosophical works and those he wrote as “an amateur of enlightened exegesis” (448) on biblical interpretation and religious language. He made this distinction clear in a statement in Oneself as Another.

"I think I have presented to my readers arguments alone, which do not assume any commitment from the reader to reject, accept, or suspend anything with regard to biblical faith. It will be observed that this asceticism of the argument, which marks, I believe, all my philosophical work, leads to a type of philosophy from which the actual mention of God is absent and in which the question of God, as a philosophical question, itself remains in a suspension that could be called agnostic (1992: 24)."

In an interview, Ricoeur has humourously referred to this position as schizophrenic (Ricoeur in Reagan 134), in that, as he observes: “If I defend my philosophical writings against the accusation of cryptotheology, I also refrain, with equal vigilance, from assigning to biblical faith a cryptophilosophica function” (1992: 24). He understands that religious language -- insofar as it makes any statements of an ontological nature -- can be examined under the heading of philosophy of religion – but he does not view related discussions as supporting any religious claims. In Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion, the primary influence has been Kant, especially the Kant of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, with an emphasis on the word “limit”.
As an advocate of hermeneutics, Ricoeur is only too well aware of the influence of cultural conditioning on one’s approaches and attitudes: “One always philosophizes from somewhere. This affirmation does not concern simply the fact of belonging to a religious tradition, but involves the entire network of cultural references of a thinker, including the economic, social and political conditions for his or her intellectual commitment” (Ricoeur in Hahn 443). From this hermeneutical perspective towards philosophy, however, religious language takes its place as one among many forms of language – ordinary, scientific, practical, moral, political, as well as philosophical -- that are of vital interest to Ricoeur (445). “As a consequence, there is no privileged place for religion in general or for the Judeo-Christian tradition, in philosophical argumentation” (Ricoeur in Reagan: 125).
He appeals to a hermeneutic phenomenology that nonetheless incorporates a distinct linguistic component in addition to a personal practical orientation. The latter is demonstrated in his most recent books, where, deeply affected by the vast scale of unmerited suffering that he witnessed in the contemporary world, he endeavoured to express an ethical position that recognizes the integrity and rights of all human beings to live well in just communities (1995).

Early Work on the Self

From his earliest work in phenomenological hermeneutics Ricoeur posited a form of identity and self understanding that has never presumed the self as totally in control of proceedings. In Ricoeur’s view, one could not comprehend oneself, let alone others, as an object of knowledge, similarly to a fact. Neither could one intuit an essence, especially of one’s mode of existence. Instead, one could arrive at self-understanding only by way of mediated forms of otherness.

Hermeneutics was certainly always a process of self-understanding, but for Ricoeur, there were always important qualifications. He posited that:

"To understand oneself was always a process of interpretation. The most important consequence of all this is that an end is put once and for all to the Cartesian and Fichtean – and to an extent Husserlian – ideal of the subject’s transparence to itself. To understand oneself is to understand oneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it the conditions for a self other than that which first undertakes the reading. Neither that of the two subjectivities … neither that of the author nor that of the reader; is thus primary in the sense of an originary presence of the self to itself." (1991: 17)

Ricoeur’s hermeneutic understanding of one’s self as the outcome of an exercise in mediation was especially evident in his three volume work Time and Narrative (1982–88). The form of self that resulted from such a narrative encounter was itself also a mediatory construct because Ricoeur viewed it as providing a stable perspective of self-understanding that neither appealed to an absolutist sense of self-certainty nor resorted to a disintegrated notion of self such as suggested by certain postmodernists.

"Without recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution. Either we must posit a subject identical with itself through the diversity of its different states, or following Hume and Nietzsche, we must hold that this identical subject is nothing more than a substantialist illusion whose elimination merely brings to light a pure manifold of cognitions, emotions and volitions." (1988: 246)

Central to Ricoeur’s approach was the fact that this version of a hermeneutic self divested itself of any sense of narcissistic self-absorption so as to become receptive to what it could learn from its encounters with the textual other. Yet Ricoeur had come to realize that the tradition from which these narratives arose could not automatically be trusted. Instructed by the masters of suspicion: Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, Ricoeur introduced what he termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As a result no text was regarded as innocent, or free from contamination by forces that manipulated its content in the service of domination or control.

In the light of such insights, Ricoeur also acknowledged the fact that his previous writings on narrative and its notion of self were overly optimistic in the sense that they took for granted the fact that every person was capable of enacting the new possibilities of being that were presented by narrative texts. Ricoeur began to advance a more ethically focused approach that addressed problem cases where people were deprived, both personally and politically, of their rights as a consequence of lack of due recognition.

Ricoeur posited that in such situations human interaction was not attuned to mutual enablement, let alone recognition of the other’s integrity. To prevent this, Ricoeur saw the need to investigate the notion of an ethical self. As a propaedeutic measure, he undertook a study of what he termed “a phenomenology of being able,” that is, of homo capax, i.e., a capable human being. This involves describing specific forms of the power to act. These included: “the power to designate oneself as the speaker of one’s own words; the power to designate oneself as the agent of one’s own activities, the power to designate oneself as the protagonist in one’s own life-story” (Ricoeur in Hahn, 1995: 367).

To this list could also be added the capacity for imputation, which involves assuming responsibility for one’s actions.*1 These developments marked a crucial change from a basically narrative understanding of the self to an ethical one, though there remains an overlap: “It belongs to the reader, now an agent, an initiator of action, to choose among the multiple proposals of ethical justice brought forth by reading. It is at this point that the notion of narrative identity encounters its limit and has to link up with the non-narrative components in the formation of an acting subject” (1988: 249).

In addition to this understanding of a capable self, Ricoeur expanded on the nature of recognition of other human beings – whether in the solicitous mutual regard of friendship or in the respect of another person as a subject of rights in a just society. In The Just (1995), Ricoeur qualified his previous work in the light of this appreciation of human capability and its specific extension to caring and just behaviour towards other members of the human family – both those known personally and those of other nations, cultures and religions. “I would like to underscore my emphasis, since Oneself as Another, on the importance of the idea of homo capax as integrating a wide conceptual field. With this theme I have tried to bring together those diverse capacities and incapacities that make human beings acting and suffering beings” (1997: xxxix).

All of these remarks are evidence of a marked departure from Ricoeur’s initially projected “poetics of the will,” and over the years this change in direction has generated much commentary. Ricoeur presents his own perspective on this alteration in an interview that took place with Charles Reagan in 1991, which I will paraphrase here. “My proposed trilogy of the will was inspired by the trilogy in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. It was delineate an eidetics, an empirics and finally a poetics of the will.” Ricoeur then relates that he deviated from this plan because of a “development in the philosophy of will itself” (1996: 124-5). This principally refers to the fact that there was both a methodological shift from an eidetic mode of phenomenological investigation in the Husserlean mode, to a hermeneutic study of symbolic language. There was also a change of emphasis in that Ricoeur became interested in matters of self-formation that witnessed to, in turn, the vagaries of the human situation. Thus, while Ricoeur allows that he continued in a type of empirical phenomenology and, to a certain measure, even with modes of poetical study in The Rule of Metaphor [1978], Time and Narrative [1984-88], and Ideology and Utopia [1986] -- which included explorations involving a productive imagination -- he nonetheless concedes that: “The point where the poetics does not respond to the announced plan is obviously the recourse to transcendent that is in Jaspers the secularized form of religion as Existenz. On this point, my philosophy is strictly agnostic, as I said at the end of Soi-même comme un autre” (1996: 125). *2

As a result, in Ricoeur’s further explorations of the multiple ways of being a capable human being, he eschews any normative or confessional stance, to the point where he admits that he is virtually “schizophrenic” (1996: 134) in his separation of philosophy and religion. In this development there is a particularly interesting influence on his work.

Influence of Hannah Arendt

In the following section of this paper, I would like to examine, though not in any exhaustive way, one of the major influences on this change of the direction in Ricoeur’s work towards practical matters of ethics, politics and justice. This influence is the work of Hannah Arendt, specifically The Human Condition (1958). Ricoeur wrote an Introduction to the French translation of this book in 1983. An abridged translation of this was published in English in Salmagundi in 1982, entitled: “Action, Reading and History: On Re-Reading The Human Condition.” In this article, Ricoeur comments on Arendt’s theory of narrative:

"The life-story proceeds as a compromise from the encounter between the events initiated by man as the agent of action, and the interplay of circumstances induced by the web of human relationships. The result is a story in which everyone is a hero without being the author: ‘nobody is the author or the producer of his own life-story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author." (1982:70)

It is in this same 1982 article on Arendt that Ricoeur also remarks on certain other themes and activities that will become prominent in his subsequent work: history, memory, promising, forgiveness. All of these themes are eloquently reprised with reference to Arendt in the Epilogue of one of his final publications, History, Memory, Forgetting, in the context of the gift (2004: 479-89). But there are two other observations that are equally important for his future trajectory. One concerns the shift in his work from the use of the term “fallible,” as in l’homme faillible – which was basically concerned with the personal empirics of the will, guilt and sin, as in The Symbolism of Evil ( 1995) -- to the word “frailty” and fragile. He adopts it in deference to Arendt’s depiction of the frailty of all human affairs -- though at first he puzzles over her use of this term with its reference to the ultimate lack of control that Arendt posits as inherent in human attempts to achieve a “secular immortality.” Arendt describes such attempts specifically in connection with three modes of activity – labour, work and action – the latter with particular attention to a dedicated engagement in the public world -- that of the polis – which has a quite different inclusiveness from that of ancient Greece. At the same time as the inherent fragility of these human undertakings, however, Arendt also allows the very unpredictability of human affairs may result in fortuitous or unexpected surprises.

Arendt’s realist, some would even say anti-modern, stance is thus relieved by her equally strong emphasis on the redeeming feature of “natality,” about which Ricoeur describes himself as reacting to with “a certain amazement”, as it was indicative of an inherent affirmation of this world and its strivings. Natality, as a dedication to an always already possible new beginning, is borrowed by Arendt from Augustine, basically in a secular sense, as a refutation of Heidegger’s description of Dasein as ordered towards mortality. Ricoeur finds in Arendt’s celebration of the world a kindred spirit to the aspirations of human strivings that he holds dear. Ricoeur also finds other resonances with Arendt that he mentions elsewhere. He cites with approval her contention that: “Love is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives”, though he acknowledges that for her this is a matter that belongs in the private domain (Arendt; 1958: 242 in Ricoeur 2004a: 488). He is also in agreement with her expansive plurality and insistence on the necessity of human intersubjectivity.

For Ricoeur, Arendt’s depiction of the given communal nature of humanity’s dwelling in the world surpasses Heidegger’s somewhat perfunctory description of Mitsein, which Ricoeur deemed as lacking a developed interpersonal ethics. He appreciates Arendt’s work as deeply committed to a project of constant renewal, of reform and justice. He remarks approvingly: “Hannah Arendt does not have to take the road through Mitsein to care”. These supportive references to Arendt substantiate Ricoeur’s own hopes for humanity, despite its frailties.

It would seem that Ricoeur is more in agreement with Arendt on the in-dwelling in humanity of its own positive source of renewal. Nonetheless, this gift, this “unfathomable aide” (86) remains of inscrutable provenance. As a philosopher, Ricoeur remains reluctant to move beyond the bounds of reason to posit any transcendent source to account for this inexplicable moment or movement of renewal. He remains steadfast in this stance when he ponders other similar movements, such as conscience, solicitude and forgiveness or pardon, that stem from a seemingly gratuitous spontaneity in their influence on human behaviour. Ricoeur describes all these modes of behaviour as belonging to an economy of the gift – which inevitably leads to forms of religious speculation – which he refrains from exploring in detail in his philosophical work.

The Human Other

In this later work, beginning with Oneself as Another, it is now another human being who is acknowledged the other. In this exercise, one encounters this other person both as irreducible in him- or herself, and as an irreducible dimension of the “dialogical constitution of the self” (2000: xiii). This is an extraordinary proposition of relational symmetry as reciprocity. Ricoeur describes the philosophical contention that is at the heart of his position of mutual interaction: “I want to bring to light the novelty of the existential category of reciprocity through an argument drawn from the difficulty phenomenology encounters in deriving reciprocity from a presumably originary dissymmetry in the relation of the ego to others” (2005: 153).

This is obviously no mere comparative exercise, it is an extremely radical claim. For what Ricoeur is proposing is not simply that I am similar to others, and thus accord them similar privileges to those I attribute to myself, but that one cannot become aware of one’s identity unless this complex interrelationship of both self-recognition and mutual recognition takes place. Ricoeur explains:

"Oneself as Another suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms." (3)

That is, one is ultimately oneself only in as much as one is at the same time other; that one attains self-worth only in so far as the comparable worth of others is necessarily integral to my worldview. Such a claim goes beyond Hegel in that what Ricoeur proposes is not simply that recognition of others is necessary for growth in knowledge and self-awareness, but that recognition involves a sense of identification with others in the uniqueness of their worth, i.e., their “irreplacability”. This means that their difference or otherness as a human being exists not to be incorporated, subsumed or even eradicated.

It is from this position of an integral intersubjectivity that Ricoeur undertakes his ethical evaluation of the work of both Levinas and Heidegger. In an interview with Richard Kearney, Ricoeur describes his own intention for this depiction in an extraordinarily succinct summary of his ultimate hermeneutic project:

"Here I try to explore the possibilities of an ethical ontology beyond the Heideggerean model of ontology without ethics, and the Levinasian model of ethics without ontology. By trying to think ethics in terms of action (praxis/ pragma) and action in terms of being as potency and act [pace Aristotle], I am seeking ways beyond the either/or of Heidegger/Levinas. The ultimate purpose of hermeneutic reflection and attestation, as I see it, is to try to retrace the line of intentional capacity and action beyond the mere objects (which we tend to focus on exclusively in our natural attitude), so that we may recover the hidden truth of our operative acts, i.e., of being capable, of being un homme capable." (2004b: 167)

In this ethical ontology, conscience is a guiding principle for Ricoeur – summoning, as it were, a person to act with solicitude, respect and responsibility. In his depiction of conscience and its connection to care, Ricoeur does acknowledge his debt to Heidegger (167). Ricoeur differs, however, in that conscience is no longer directed to realizing one’s ownmost possibilities, but to endeavouring to facilitate other people’s attainment of their own possibilites within the mandate of a just society (1992: 352). Ricoeur’s analysis of the gift of the animating conscience that inspires such conduct pushes philosophical reflection to its limits. It would seem that in Ricoeur’s portrayal of this moment/ movement that the impulse of conscience and Arendt’s notion of natality coincide. Ricoeur here proposes that: “The promise of a regeneration of power, of the effective capacity to live the good life, of the reign of justice and peace, this promise is of another nature. It belongs to the economy of the gift that announces itself at the borders of philosophy, at once beyond its limits and within its limits” (“Reply to Bourgeois”, in Hahn, 1995: 570). At the same time, however, Ricoeur acknowledges that such conduct implies an out of the ordinary demand being requested of human beings.

It needs to be noted that Ricoeur does not dismiss either of these approaches, i.e., that of Levinas or Heidegger, out of hand, acknowledging that both of them have their merits, and that “my argument here does not require us to decide in favour of one or the other of them” (154). His own appreciation of the relationship of intersubjectivity is, however, one that wants to endorse mutual recognition. Ricoeur finds that there is a lack of reciprocity in both of the human encounters depicted by Husserl and Levinas. He thinks that in Husserl there is a merely the theoretical criterion of “apperception” at a theoretical level on the part of the ego. This does not accept the absolute integrity of the other person in their full human capacity as acting and suffering. Thus, there is no esteem that is accorded to the other. Neither is the capability of the other as an ethical agent in his or her own right acknowledged. All initiative is on the part of the subject who derives an alter-ego from a projection of his or her own ego. Mutual recognition does take place.

In the case of Levinas, Ricoeur views the ethical injunction, issued by the other to a subject who must be utterly responsible for this other, as denying the integrity of the subject. The subject, because his or her response takes place pre-reflectively, is denied its self-estimation, and thus, on Ricoeur’s account, acts under duress without critical reflection. This could, as Ricoeur understands it, lead to self-abnegation on the part of the subject. He regards this as an unfortunate result in that a person enjoined to such an orientation of self-denial cannot act from the fullness of their being. *3

One needs to be extremely careful in making such distinctions, as Ricoeur admits he has learned much from Levinas and his call for a primordial responsibility to the other, and the injunction to “not to kill” uttered by the other. Indeed, Ricoeur is just as insistent as Levinas on the need for care and acknowledgement of the other, but he does not want the exchange to be so one-sided.

Ricoeur also takes issue with Levinas’s own “totalizing” description of Western ontology as a mechanism of totalization; one that has not paid sufficient attention to the plight of otherness, i.e., it has been content to homogenize the notion of Being, in either classical metaphysical or Heideggerean forms. In response, Ricoeur suggests that his own hermeneutic program, with its movements of suspicion and recognition, as not falling prey to such an impulse to totalization. He believes that the hermeneutics of suspicion that is a crucial part of the process of self-reflexivity mitigates any sort of self-absorption that would support a disregard of the other. For Ricoeur, all initiative in Levinas’s model comes from the other who mandates an extreme responsibility on the part the subject. Again, there is no mutual recognition, where each person is regarded as irreplaceable. Ricoeur thus understands both of these forms of intersubjectivity – that of Husserl and that of Levinas – to be manifestations of a “unilateral dialectics,” instead of the dialogical exchange he wishes to promote. To this end, Ricoeur suggests moving beyond the “modified solipsism” of Husserl, and the “absolute imperative” of Levinas, in order to lessen the dissymmetry. He remarks : “A two-pronged conception of otherness remains to be constructed here, one that does justice in turn to the primacy of self-esteem and also to the primacy of the convocation coming from the other” (1992: 331). In Ricoeur’s view, what appears to be lacking in both cases is the solicitude that results from the self-esteem of a person that holds him- or her-self ethically accountable to the other for their respective actions. This solicitude initially arises from an awareness of the mutual suffering, of the fragility, especially of the mortality that all human beings share in common. In a particularly poignant passage Ricoeur portrays his own exemplar of reciprocal relations between human beings:

"In true sympathy the self, whose power of acting is at the start greater than that of its other, finds itself affected by all that the suffering other offers to it in return. For from the suffering other there comes a giving that is no longer drawn from the power of acting and existing but precisely from weakness itself. This is perhaps the supreme test of solicitude, where unequal power finds compensation in an authentic reciprocity in exchange, which, in the hour of agony, finds refuge in the shared whisper of voices or the feeble embrace of clasped hands" (1992: 191).

Conclusion

Ricoeur has been faithful to his own independent vision as he has painstakingly carved out a phenomenological hermeneutical approach that nonetheless owes much to his formative predecessors, Husserl and Heidegger. At the same time he has responded, by way of philosophy of language and action theory, to other contemporary challenges that have been brought to bear on the nature of the modern self and subjectivity. Finally, he has also been influenced by the work of both Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas as he has striven to develop an ethical orientation that is exquisitely mindful of others, in their dispossessed and suffering states, without a complete abnegation of one’s own identity. In these explorations, the dream of total mediation, as well as the notion of a transparent or imperial self has been replaced by a more fragile and chastened notion that still allows for forms of human action that promote a teleologically ordered ideal of justice in this world.



Bibliography

Antohi, Sorin, 2005. “Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi”, Janus Head, 8/1: 8-25.
Hahn, Lewis Edwin, 1995. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Peru Ill.: Open Court.
Raynova, Yvanka, 2003. “All that Give Us to Think: Conversations with Paul Ricoeur,” in Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, A. Wiercinski (ed.), Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 670-96.
Reagan, Charles, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Ricoeur, Paul, 2005. The Course of Recognition. Trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ricoeur,Paul, 2004a. History, Memory, Forgetting. Trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Ricoeur,Paul, 2004b. “On life Stories (2003),” in On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva, R. Kearney, London: Ashgate, 157-69.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1999. “Memory and Forgetting,” Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. R. Kearney and M. Dooley (eds.), London: Routledge.
Ricoeur,Paul1998. Critique and Conviction, F. Azouvi and M. de Launay (eds.).Trans. K. Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1997. “A Response by Paul Ricoeur,”, Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. M. Joy (ed.), Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1996a. “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, Richard Kearney (ed.), London: Sage, 3-13.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1996b. “Love and Justice,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, London: Sage, 23-39.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1996c. “From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy,”Philosophy Today, 14/4: 443-58.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1995. The Just. Trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1992. Oneself as Another, K. Blamey, (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1988.Time and Narrative, Vol. 3. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press,.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1986. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” Facts and Values. Philosophical Reflections from Western and Non-Western Perspectives, M.C, Doeser and J.N. Kraaj (eds.), Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 121-132.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1983. “Action, Story and History: On Re-Reading The Human Condition”, Salmagundi 60, 60-72.
Ricoeur,Paul, 1967, The Symbolism of Evil, E. Buchanan, (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.